Professor Spooner came to Penn as a Professor of Anthropology in 1968. He later served as the University's Middle East Center Director from 1986 to 1995. He was Interim Co-Director of the Lauder Institute from 2009 to 2011, and has been a Fellow at the Penn Institute of Urban Research since 2007. He serves on the graduate groups of NELC, SAST and RELS and is an Affiliate Faculty member of the Graduate School of Education Program on International Education Development.
Spooner has written numerous articles, chapters, and books (see selection below), based on his Oxford education in Classical Studies and Persian and his ethnographic research in various parts of Afghanistan, China, Iran, India, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, with such topics as the history of desert areas, ecology and development, irrigation, pastoral nomadism, and language and culture as his major interests. He has long-term research interests in the Middle East, South and Central Asia, in religion, ecology, and rural development, and has a special research interest in the history of the Persian language. In addition to his research, teaching, and writing, he is also the curator for Near Eastern Ethnology at the University of Pennsylvania Museum and serves on the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate Groups for Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Religious Studies, and South Asia Regional Studies.
Oxford University, B.A., D.Phil. (1960, 1967)
- Cultural and Social Anthropology
- Globalization in the Middle East, South Asia and Central Asia
- Social Organization, Religion, Ethnohistory, Ecology and Rural Development
- Population Growth, Anthropological Implications, (ed.) Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972.
- “The Cultural Ecology of Pastoral Nomads,” Addison-Wesley Modular Publication #45. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1973.
- Ecology and Development, A Rationale for Three-Dimensional Policy, Tokyo: The United Nations University, 1984.
- “Weavers and Dealers, The Authenticity of an Oriental Carpet,” in The Social Life of Things, Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Reading Nasta’liq, Persian and Urdu Hands from 1500 to the Present (with William L. Hanaway), Costa Mesa, Ca. : Mazda Publishers, 1995 and 2007.
- “Siyaq: Numerical Notation and Numeracy in the Persianate World,” (with William L. Hanaway) in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Mathematics, edited by Eleanor Robson and Jaqueline Stedall, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 429-447.
- Literacy in the Persianate World, Writing and the Social Order, ed. with William L. Hanaway, Museum Publications, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.
- Language Policy and Language Conflict in Afghanistan and its Neighbors, The Changing Politics of Language Choice (ed. with Harold Schiffman, Leiden: Brill, 2012.
- "Investment and Translocality, Recontextualizing the Baluch in Islamic and Global History," in Crossroads Asia Working Paper Series, No. 14 (2015).
- Globalization, The Crucial Phase (ed.), Museum Publications, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (2015).
- “The Persianate Millennium,” in The Persianate World, edited by Nile Green, Oakland, Ca.: University of California Press, 2019, pp. 301-316.